Japanese Reader Collection

This complete Audiobook is designed to not require the e-book or paperback. Improve your Japanese listening comprehension while walking the dog, driving in your car, or while cooking dinner.

Learn Japanese vocabulary while listening to the stories of Momotaro and Usagi to Kame (Tortoise and the Hare). For upper beginners of Japanese and higher.

For beginning to intermediate students of Japanese. Listen and learn Japanese with two well-known Japanese folktales: "Inch-high Samurai" and "Kaguya-hime", the Moon Princess. The first is about a tiny, yet brave samurai who ends up saving a princess and seeing his wish come true. The second story is the famous moon-princess Kaguya, who was found in a bamboo stalk. "Kaguya-hime" is one of the oldest Japanese tales and perhaps the world’s first science-fiction story.

Learn Japanese with Stories 4: The Mouse Bride and Ikkyū-san turns these two classic tales—stories every Japanese child grows up hearing—into a complete listening course for upper-beginner Japanese learners.

Two of Japan's most beloved folktales—and more than two hours of guided listening built to make real Japanese finally click. An old man keeps a pet sparrow he loves like a child. His sharp-tongued wife has other feelings—and one afternoon, over a bowl of spilled starch, she does something cruel. What happens when the old man goes looking for his little friend, and what he chooses to carry home, has been teaching Japanese children about kindness and greed for centuries.

Learn Japanese with Stories 6: Yuki-Onna, Anchin and Kiyohime turns both classics into a complete listening course for upper-beginner learners. Every story is taught in seven passes, so your understanding builds one layer at a time.

Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Match Girl" is not a Japanese folktale. It is Danish, first published in 1845. But Japan took it in well over a century ago, and generations of Japanese children have grown up with it. That makes it unusually good material for study: you probably already know how the story goes, so your attention is free for the Japanese.

Hikoichi is back. If you listened to Volume One, you already know him: the clever young man whose quick thinking always leaves somebody else standing there scratching their head. This volume brings three more tales, and in the last of them Hikoichi steps aside for a story of a very different kind. First, a shattered vase and a village chieftain who cannot find the culprit, until Hikoichi proposes a strange little test. Then a shape-shifting tanuki who has been tormenting the whole village and makes the mistake of trying his tricks on Hikoichi.

Meet Chiyo-ni. A morning glory has wound itself around her well bucket overnight. Rather than tear it off, she goes next door to borrow water. That single act, and the seventeen sounds she wrote about it, made her one of the most loved poets Japan has ever produced. Fukuda Chiyo-ni was born in 1703, widowed young, and became a Buddhist nun in her fifties. She wrote right up to her death poem at seventy-three. Her haiku are small, kind, and often funny, and they are written in the real Japanese of three hundred years ago. This audiobook teaches you twenty-five of them, whole.